Sprint: How to Solve Big Problems and Test New Ideas in Just Five Days

by Jake Knapp

3 Time and Space

There are stacks of studies about the cost of interruption. Researchers at George Mason University found that people wrote shorter, lower-quality essays when interrupted in the middle of their work. Researchers at the University of California, Irvine, reported that it takes on average twenty-three minutes for distracted workers to return to their tasks.

That’s one of the best aspects of a sprint: It gives you an excuse to work the way you want to work, with a clear calendar and one important goal to address. There are no context switches between different projects, and no random interruptions. A sprint day looks like this:

You’ll start at 10 a.m. and end at 5 p.m., with an hour-long lunch in between. That’s right: There are only six working hours in the typical sprint day. Longer hours don’t equal better results. By getting the right people together, structuring the activities, and eliminating distraction, we’ve found that it’s possible to make rapid progress while working a reasonable schedule.

By starting at 10 a.m., we give everyone time to check email and feel caught up before the day begins. By ending before people get too tired, we ensure the energy level stays high throughout the week.

Five days provide enough urgency to sharpen focus and cut out useless debate, but enough breathing room to build and test a prototype without working to exhaustion. And because most companies use a five-day workweek, it’s feasible to slot a five-day sprint into existing schedules.

Your team will take a short morning break (around 11:30 a.m.), an hour-long lunch (around 1 p.m.), and a short afternoon break (around 3:30 p.m.). These breaks are a sort of “pressure-release valve,” allowing people to rest their brains and catch up on work happening outside the sprint.

Inside the sprint room, everybody will be 100 percent focused on the sprint’s challenge. The entire team must shut their ...

In a sprint, time is precious, and we can’t afford distractions in the room. So we have a simple rule: No laptops, phones, or iPads allowed.

These devices can suck the momentum out of a sprint. If you’re looking at a screen, you’re not paying attention to what’s going on in the room, so you won’t be able to help the team. What’s worse, you’re unconsciously saying, “This work isn’t interesting.”

To make sure nobody misses anything important, there are two exceptions to the no-device rule: 1. It’s okay to check your device during a break. 2. It’s okay to leave the room to check your device. At any time. No judgment. Take a call, check an email, tweet a Tweet, whatever—just take it outside.

We also use devices for some specific purposes: when we need to show something to the whole team, and on Thursday for prototyping. See, we’re not so mean.

Finally, we called time-out and walked to Office Depot to buy some of those giant poster-size Post-it notes. It cost us about an hour and a half and taught us an important lesson: Check the whiteboards before the sprint starts.

We’ve found that magic happens when we use big whiteboards to solve problems. As humans, our short-term memory is not all that good, but our spatial memory is awesome. A sprint room, plastered with notes, diagrams, printouts, and more, takes advantage of that spatial memory. The room itself becomes a sort of shared brain for the team. As our friend Tim Brown, CEO of the design firm IDEO, writes in his book Change by Design: “The simultaneous visibility of these project materials helps us identify patterns and encourages creative synthesis to occur much more readily than when these resources are hidden away in file folders, notebooks, or PowerPoint decks.”

At minimum, you’ll need two big whiteboards. That will provide enough space to do most of the sprint activities (you’ll still have to take photos and do some erasing and reorganizing as you go) and enough to keep the most important notes visible for the entire week. If there aren’t two whiteboards already mounted to the wall in your sprint room, there are a few easy ways to add more: Rolling Whiteboards These come in small and giant sizes. The small ones have a lot of unusable space down by the floor, and they shake when you draw on them. The giant ones cost a lot more, but they’re actually usable.

IdeaPaint IdeaPaint is paint that turns regular walls into whiteboards. It works great on smooth walls, and less great on rough walls. One word of advice: If you use IdeaPaint, be sure to paint all the walls. If you don’t, it’s just a matter of time before somebody writes on the non-IdeaPaint wall by accident.

Paper If you can’t get hold of whiteboards, paper is better than nothing. Those poster-size Post-it notes are pricey but easy to arrange and swap when you make mistakes. Butcher paper provides serious surface area...

you’ll need a bunch of basic office supplies, including sticky notes, markers, pens, Time Timers (see below), and regular old printer paper. You’ll also need healthy snacks to keep up the team’s energy. We’ve got strong opinions about which supplies are best, so we’ve included a shopping list at the end of the book.

We use Time Timers in our sprints to mark small chunks of time, anywhere from three minutes to one hour. These tiny deadlines give everyone an added sense of focus and urgency.

First, it makes you look like you know what you’re doing. After all, you’ve got a crazy clock! Second, although most would never admit it, people like having a tight schedule. It builds confidence in the sprint process, and in you as a Facilitator.

He says something like: “I’m going to use this timer to keep things moving. When it goes off, it’s a reminder to us to see if we can move on to the next topic. If you’re talking when the timer beeps, just keep talking, and I’ll add a little more time. It’s a guideline, not a fire alarm.” The first time you set it, people’s eyes may get big, and blood pressure may rise a little. But give it a chance. By the afternoon, they’ll be used to it, and most likely, they’ll want to take it with them after the sprint.

Monday

4 Start at the End

When a big problem comes along, like the challenge you selected for your sprint, it’s natural to want to solve it right away. The clock is ticking, the team is amped up, and solutions start popping into everyone’s mind. But if you don’t first slow down, share what you know, and prioritize, you could end up wasting time and effort on the wrong part of the problem.

If Mission Control had worried about the air filter first, they would have missed their window to fix the trajectory, and the Apollo 13 spaceship might have careened off toward Pluto.I Instead, NASA got organized and sorted their priorities before they started on solutions. That’s smart. And that’s the same way your team will start your sprint. In fact (with the luxury of unlimited oxygen) you’ll devote the entire first day of your sprint to planning.

Monday begins with an exercise we call Start at the End: a look ahead—to the end of t...

To start the conversation, ask your team this question: “Why are we doing this project? Where do we want to be six months, a year, or even five years from now?”

While writing your long-term goal, you were optimistic. You imagined a perfect future. Now it’s time to get pessimistic. Imagine you’ve gone forward in time one year, and your project was a disaster. What caused it to fail? How did your goal go wrong?

We have a few prompts for getting teams to think about assumptions and questions: • What questions do we want to answer in this sprint? • To meet our long-term goal, what has to be true? • Imagine we travel into the future and our project failed. What might have caused that?

An important part of this exercise is rephrasing assumptions and obstacles into questions. Blue Bottle Coffee assumed they could find a way to convey their expertise through their website, but before the sprint, they weren’t sure how. It’s not difficult to find an assumption such as Blue Bottle’s and turn it into a question: Q: To reach new customers, what has to be true? A: They have to trust our expertise. Q: How can we phrase that as a question? A: Will customers trust our expertise?

5 Map

The map you’ll create on Monday isn’t so different: a simple diagram representing lots of complexity. Instead of elves and wizards moving through Middle Earth, your map will show customers moving through your service or product. Not quite as thrilling, but every bit as useful.

The map is a big deal throughout the week. At the end of the day on Monday, you’ll use the map to narrow your broad challenge into a specific target for the sprint. Later in the week, the map will provide structure for your solution sketches and prototype. It helps you keep track of how everything fits together, and it eases the burden on each person’s short-term memory.

On Monday of their sprint, Savioke had to organize information about robotics, navigation, hotel operations, and guest habits. This is their map:

1. List the actors (on the left) The “actors” are all the important characters in your story. Most often, they’re different kinds of customers. Sometimes, people other than customers—say, your sales team or a government regulator—are important actors and should be listed as well. And sometimes, of course, there’s a robot. 2. Write the ending (on the right) It’s usually a lot easier to figure out the end than the middle of the story. Flatiron’s story ended with treatment. Savioke’s story ended with a delivery. And Blue Bottle’s story ended with buying coffee. 3. Words and arrows in between The map should be functional, not a work of art. Words and arrows and the occasional box should be enough. No drawing expertise required. 4. Keep it simple Your map should have from five to around fifteen steps. If there are more than twenty, it’s probably too complicated. By keeping the map simple, the team can agree on the structure of the problem without getting tied up in competing solutions. 5. Ask for help As you draw, you should keep asking the team, “Does this map look right?” You should be able to make the first quick draft of your map in thirty to sixty minutes.

For the rest of the day, you’ll interview the experts on your team to gather more information about the problem space. As you go, you’ll add more questions, make updates to your map, and perhaps even adjust the phrasing of your long-term goal. And you’ll take notes as a team, to add more depth to the map on the whiteboard. Your job on Monday afternoon will be to assemble one cohesive picture from everyone’s pooled knowledge and expertise. In the next chapter, we’ll give you a recipe for learning from the experts at your company, and we’ll show a nearly magical way to take notes.

6 Ask the Experts

In the normal course of business, teams don’t get the chance to join forces and use all of that knowledge.

Most of Monday afternoon is devoted to an exercise we call Ask the Experts: a series of one-at-a-time interviews with people from your sprint team, from around your company, and possibly even an outsider or two with special knowledge. As you go, each member of your team will take notes individually. You’ll be gathering the information you need to choose the target of your sprint, while gathering fuel for the solutions you sketch on Tuesday.

Nobody knows everything, not even the CEO. Instead, the information is distributed asymmetrically across the team and across the company. In the sprint, you’ve got to gather it and make sense of it, and asking the experts is the best and fastest way to do that.

We think it’s useful to have at least one expert who can talk about each of these topics: Strategy Start by talking to the Decider. If the Decider is not going to be in the sprint the whole time, be sure she joins you on Monday afternoon. Some useful questions to ask: “What will make this project a success?” “What’s our unique advantage or opportunity?” “What’s the biggest risk?” Voice of the Customer Who talks to your customers more than anyone else? Who can explain the world from their perspective? Wendy is a prime example of a customer expert. Whether this person is in sales, customer support, research, or whatever, his or her insights will likely be crucial. How Things Work Who understands the mechanics of your product? On your sprint team, you’ve got the people building your product or delivering your idea—the designer, the engineer, the marketer. Savioke interviewed roboticists, Blue Bottle interviewed baristas, and Flatiron interviewed oncologists. Think about bringing in the money expert, the tech/logistics expert, and the marketing expert as well. We frequently talk with two, three, or four “how things work” experts to help us understand how everything fits together. Previous Efforts Often, someone on the team has already thought about the problem in detail. That person might have an idea about the solution, a failed experiment, or maybe even some work in progress. You should examine those preexisting solutions. Many sprint teams get great results by fleshing out ...

Later, when you begin executing your successful solutions, the experts you brought in will probably be among your biggest supporters.

1. Introduce the sprint If the expert isn’t part of the sprint team, tell her what the sprint is about. 2. Review the whiteboards Give the expert a two-minute tour of the long-term goal, sprint questions, and map. 3. Open the door Ask the expert to tell you everything she knows about the challenge at hand. 4. Ask questions The sprint team should act like a bunch of reporters digging for a story. Ask the expert to fill in areas where she has extra expertise. Ask her to retell you what she thinks you already know. And most important, ask the expert to tell you where you’ve got it wrong. Can she find anything on your map that’s incomplete? Would she add any sprint questions to your list? What opportunities does she see? Useful phrases are “Why?” and “Tell me more about that.” 5. Fix the whiteboards Add sprint questions. Change your map. If necessary, update your long-term goal. Your experts are here to tell you what you didn’t know (or forgot) in the morning, so don’t be shy about making revisions. That’s it. Your experts don’t have to prepare a slide deck.

The method is called How Might We. It was developed at Procter & Gamble in the 1970s, but we learned about it from the design agency IDEO. It works this way: Each person writes his or her own notes, one at a time, on sticky notes. At the end of the day, you’ll merge the whole group’s notes, organize them, and choose a handful of the most interesting ones. These standout notes will help you make a decision about which part of the map to target, and on Tuesday, they’ll give you ideas for your sketches. With this technique, you take notes in the form of a question, beginning with the words “How might we . . . ?” For example, with Blue Bottle, we could ask, “How might we re-create the café experience?” or “How might we ensure coffee arrives fresh?”

When we tried it, we came to appreciate how the open-ended, optimistic phrasing forced us to look for opportunities and challenges, rather than getting bogged down by problems or, almost worse, jumping to solutions too soon. And because every question shares the same format, it’s possible to read, understand, and evaluate a whole wall full of these notes at once (which is what you’ll do later in the afternoon).

Every person on the team needs his or her own pad of sticky notes (plain yellow, three by five inches) and a thick black dry-erase marker.II Using thick markers on a small surface forces everyone to write succinct, easy-to-read headlines.

To take notes, follow these steps: 1. Put the letters “HMW” in the top left corner of your sticky note. 2. Wait. 3. When you hear something interesting, convert it into a question (quietly). 4. Write the question on your sticky note. 5. Peel off the note and set it aside.

Each How Might We note captured a problem and converted it into an opportunity. What’s more, each question could be answered in many different ways. They weren’t too broad (“How might we reinvent health care?”) or too narrow (“How might we put our logo in the top right corner?”) Instead, Flatiron’s How Might We notes were just specific enough to inspire multiple solutions. On Tuesday, they would provide the perfect inspiration for our sketches.

In most sprints, we end up with somewhere between thirty and a hundred. Unfortunately, you can’t make good use of that many How Might We questions. Once you turn your attention to sketching, it will be too many opportunities for the poor human brain to track. You’ve got to narrow them down.

As the organization goes on, it’ll be useful to label the themes. Just write a title on a fresh sticky note and put it above the group. (We usually end up with a “Misc” theme of notes that don’t fit anywhere else. Those misfit notes often end up being some of the best ones.)